


Give Credit

by scioscribe



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Concussions, Friendship, Gen, Huddling For Warmth, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-05-14 07:51:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5735611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Honestly, Burr,” Alexander said, “you think I want it published far and wide that I sustained my most notable war wound at the hands of a puddle and a rock?  Your reputation—such as it is—is safe in my hands.  No one will know the fault of the hex you placed on me—”</p><p>“You’re clumsy!”</p><p>“—or the virtue of your care afterwards.  You will remain an inscrutable nonentity, only capable of hypotheticals, as I assume you desire.  Now help me up.”</p><p>(The one where Hamilton gets a concussion and Burr strives to keep him up all night.)</p>
            </blockquote>





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**Author's Note:**

> The idea that it's unsafe to sleep with a concussion is actually mostly a myth--if they're alert and can talk coherently, it's safe for them to sleep, which means this is a story about Burr and Hamilton keeping each other awake all night for no justifiable medical reason. But since it's the eighteenth century, they don't know that.
> 
> Also, Hamilton rags on Jonathan Edwards, if you would like to know that in advance.
> 
> (I should also admit up front that there's no logical reason for Hamilton and Burr to be on a scouting mission on their own, and I don't even try to justify it.)

“Ow,” Alexander said.

“I in no way specified that you should choose the slipperiest cliff-face in the vicinity,” Burr said, ignoring the rat-toothed gnawing of conscience as he tilted Hamilton’s head back to get a better view of the gash. “Your doe-eyes are misdirected; focus instead on your head nearly getting bisected by a rock the general will try for treason and mischief if all’s not well. Are you seeing stars? A fog?”

“I took a blow to the head, not a blow to the eyes.” He blinked. “Doe-eyes? That’s rich, coming from the man suddenly fawning. Is that guilt calling?”

“Does your head hurt?”

“Of course.”

“Right. A pointless question, I suppose.” He liked the rat-a-tat rapidity of Alexander’s answers, as prompt and vigorous as a drummer’s roll, but remained less than fond of the way his gaze kept wandering to the emptiness over Burr’s shoulder. At least he was upright again—Burr had passed the first ten minutes after Alexander’s fall in what he was uncomfortably aware could have been taken for a state of panic, hovering about Alexander’s prone form like a husband at his wife’s childbed. It had been discomfiting, he supposed, to see Alexander so brutally _stopped_.

He resumed his line of questioning. “Do you feel inclined to vomit?”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Alexander said.

“Ha.”

“My stomach is as steady as rock.”

Burr looked at him.

“Okay,” Hamilton acknowledged, looking at the rubble he’d dragged with him down the mountainside. “Bad example.”

“I should say so.” He pressed a palm to his own forehead and tried to think. “Were you at least able to tell the British position before you fell?”

Hamilton nodded enthusiastically and then winced, cracking the shield of blood that had dried on his face. “Five miles west at least. They should know by now that those coats of theirs are a sentry’s wet dream.” He scratched at the blood. “Maybe,” he said, “maybe they got here before us and left rocks everywhere to trip us up.”

Burr frowned. “I can’t tell if you’re being whimsical or merely concussed.”

“We’ve discussed this. I,” he gestured toward his chest, “am fine. You,” waving his hand toward Burr, “are overly cautious and afraid of trouble, which this isn’t. We’ll return to camp and all will be well.”

“And you won’t tell?” He had no wish to march a bloodied and battered Alexander Hamilton back into camp and present him to the general—here’s your colonel, much worse for wear—and to Lafayette and Laurens, who’d meet Hamilton’s blood with as much bloodthirstiness and Washington would meet it with frost. Bad enough to play the man’s escort home; he couldn’t imagine the trouble he’d be in if their situation got known. No good, then, saying how he’d fretted, true or not, because it would never whet their appetite for giving blame. He would have to shoulder it, too, to be an honest man.

(“A higher plane would let us better map our route to avoid the redcoat troops,” he had said, which might have been an innocent enough remark had he not _known_ that Hamilton responded to neutral statements— _there is an objective we might achieve_ —with a fervor to accomplish them.

And had he not been motivated in part by a desire to close the book of Hamilton’s mouth halfway through chapter fourteen of his theory on how the union had best be constituted. For sure his culpability wouldn’t show on his face—or so he’d thought, before Alexander had started assigning conscience to him left and right.)

“Honestly, Burr,” Alexander said, “you think I want it published far and wide that I sustained my most notable war wound at the hands of a puddle and a rock? Your reputation—such as it is—is safe in my hands. No one will know the fault of the hex you placed on me—”

“You’re clumsy!”

“—or the virtue of your care afterwards. You will remain an inscrutable nonentity, only capable of hypotheticals, as I assume you desire. Now help me up.”

“I really think you had best sit a while longer, just until you feel stronger.”

“You don’t know how I feel!”

“I know how you _look_ —face gone as white as a page from a book.”

“Leave the poetry to those of us better-fitted for it,” Alexander said.

Burr crossed his arms. A rebuttal in this situation was pointless. If Hamilton were capable of movement, he would be moving; they both knew that. Burr could wait out his stubbornness: if Alexander could outrun, he could outlast. In that way, they were both Washington’s sons.

“Fine,” Alexander said, as cross as a child being confined to bed. “I may be a little unsteady on my feet, I’ll grant you. What you could do is leave me here—”

“ _No_.”

“I never knew you to be sentimental,” Alexander said, with just the faintest trace of wonder in his voice, as though the knock to his head had made him see stars after all. He could have been nineteen again, grabbing Burr’s arm on the street, his eagerness a pin to turn the tumblers in the lock of Burr’s mouth. He’d never denied Alexander any part of the truth—that, he wanted to say, was sentiment.

“You could more easily fetch assistance if you went alone,” Alexander continued, in his most persuasive tones, as if Burr could be that easily beguiled. “And there would be no reason for their troops to pass this way.”

“Follow me on this,” Burr said. “We came from that way.” He pointed. “The British are this way.” Another jab at the horizon. “If we came from there, to here, there is an equal chance that they will come from _there_ to here, as in both cases, this is a godforsaken middle of nowhere spot good only for the view.”

Alexander pointed his fingers at him like twin pistols: “ _Hey_. Thanks, man.”

“I did not mean _you_ —it’s like talking to a child,” he complained unto the heavens. “Use the sense that hasn’t bled out of you and think. They’re as likely to send sentries here as we as sentries were to come. Much of war is identical purpose and identical means, and this is no different. But our _numbers_ are not identical.”

“And then will hardly become less so if their troops stumble across the two of us than the one.”

“Yet two we are a company and alone, we are not. And you’re not capable of shooting straight in this condition.”

“No?”

“No,” Burr said decisively, at which point Alexander Hamilton nodded, winced, leaned forward, and expelled the contents of his stomach directly onto Burr’s boots.

“You might,” Burr said, “have turned a little in either direction.”

Hamilton wiped the back of his mouth and muttered a _sorry_ that was so uncharacteristically small and plaintive that Burr was forced again to experience that lockpick feeling of being in his company. He didn’t relish it: it wasn’t safe. He took out his handkerchief and, wetting it a little at the mouth of his canteen, offered it to Alexander. “Your face is divided into quadrants of puke and dried blood. Our recourse is to fight the British, not terrify them.” But Hamilton just held the little square of cloth like his fingers were clothesline, and at last Burr took it back, sopped it a little more, and hunkered down.

“Turn your head a little, man.” He cleaned Hamilton’s face in broad, not entirely gentle strokes, and when the crusts of gore and sick were off him, he looked better—because anyone without streaks of their insides on their outsides looked better. He was still a little on the ashy side, but they were losing, rapidly, the light that would have let him tell any better.

He took advantage of what was left of the sunset to clean off his boots.

“I’ll have that laundered,” Alexander said, finally.

“I wouldn’t squander soap on it.” He let it flutter off his hand, where it blew off, a banner of muddy surrender to—well, something, probably. “Here’s our plan.”

“Since I haven’t been consulted on it, it’s maybe more yours than mine.”

“True, but your brains just got scrambled, so that’s fine. We’ll spend the night here—”

“There’s no cover!”

“There,” Burr said, “now you can cosign as a collaborator in truth.”

“Don’t condescend.”

“You’re the better tactician, you’ve had the advantages of sitting at Washington’s right hand—where’s the better defensive position, if we had to make a stand?”

It normalized things, he decided, being able to see more of Alexander’s face. Over their long acquaintance, he had of course seen Alexander battered and bloodied—who was he to that group of theirs, if not the one called to provide bail money and sponge off the blood?—but Washington had kept him rather more whole lately than not. He’d lost the trick of not minding Hamilton’s injuries.

Alexander, having taken some time to mull the issue over and mutter under his breath, finally pointed towards a copse of pines. He’d thankfully stayed within easy distance. Burr couldn’t imagine lugging him much further.

“Good,” Burr said, and Alexander’s eyes, previously half-closed, fluttered open again, as instinctive and wary a response to praise as that of a much-kicked pup. He held out his hand and Alexander took it: Burr levered him up as gradually as he could so as not to jar his already tender head.

“Even stunned like a poleaxed calf, you have a good sense of terrain,” Burr said as they negotiated the landscape together. He needed to distract Alexander from realizing that they were linked arm-in-arm like ladies on a dance floor, for he had no wish to spend the rest of the walk in open warfare over Hamilton’s dizziness and need for help. “When you have your command, you’ll do well with it. And _I_ will do well not having to explain to Washington why I left his prize aide mounted alone against the British like a scarecrow.”

“You’re overrating his concern.”

“When someone talks as much as you do, they never stop to listen,” Burr said. “You’d miss the nose off your face. He’s partial to you, he’s partisan. Don’t mistake that.”

Hamilton made a face that didn’t quite disguise how thin and white his lips had gotten with the pressure of his grimace. “Do people keep trying to be _your_ father? Is this, like, an _orphan_ thing? Do men just pick one at random, do merchants come to you with a scale in one hand to weigh your dead and then make you an offer of false paternity?”

Burr looked down at his feet, at the blades of grass broken by their boots as they pressed forward in their uneven lines, their company of two and all their attendant ghosts.

“No,” he said. “No one has made me such an offer.”

Alexander made some sound and then dipped his chin a little. He seemed to see for the first time that they were holding onto each other, and he moved his thumb across the back of Burr’s wrist.

“You were right.”

“Hmm?”

“I should talk less.”

“No,” Burr said, neither truthfully nor untruthfully, and because they had reached their objective, he—ever the faithful escort—let Alexander down gently and with good grace into what he judged to be the softest pile of pine needles. Hamilton leaned his head back against the scaly bark. In the failing light, his eyes were black; his head had started bleeding again. Never mind the poleaxed calf, what he looked like was a shot deer, ready for butchering. Which Burr would not let happen.

He’d intended to build a fire, but with the night as clear as it was, it wasn’t worth the risk: they could sit shoulder-to-shoulder for warmth, and there’d be no sleeping for either of them, anyway, not with the need to keep Hamilton’s brain from transforming inside his skull into a great clot of blood, or whatever it was concussions did to a man that wakefulness somehow deferred unto death.

That meant there was nothing left for them to do but wait out the night.

Alexander’s head had lolled to one side, whatever guilt he felt not enough, it seemed, to keep him up. Burr bumped their shoulders together. “I need you alert.”

“So you said.”

“I thought you’d just reconciled yourself to taking my advice,” Burr said, without even a flicker of shame.

One corner of Hamilton’s mouth lifted. “So it’s going to be like that?”

“You think you’re the only one who can talk?” He stretched out his legs. “I use a stiletto, you use a broadsword. Whatever gets the job done, sir, but you have to admit my way is finer.”

“I can use a stiletto.”

“Sure—but only a dozen at a time.”

“Antagonizing me, that’s how you plan to keep me up? I sleep through cannon-fire, Burr.” He closed his eyes again, but restlessness persisted, the little muscles and nerves of his cheek and jaw and eyelids jumping underneath his skin. Burr watched, amused.

“Go on, try it, sir. You sit, I’m ‘a spit.”

“That doesn’t even sound right.”

“I’m not taciturn by nature, only by caution, Alexander: I can talk with the best of them.”

“Really?” Alexander said, incredulity pitching his voice up almost a full octave. “You—Aaron Burr—are gonna talk all night? History will never believe it.”

“History will never know,” Burr said, and to his surprise, he liked the sound of that. He stretched out his legs, the toe of his boot brushing against Alexander’s, and looked up at the black silk of the sky; the stars were clear but far away, the light of them shining on distant places, and he and Alexander in the dark, unnoticed and unnoticeable by any eyes but heaven’s. It was an evening with no witnesses and would never be more than a footnote in their lives.

“See?” Alexander said. “You can’t.”

“It’s a poor conversation if I spout uninvited discourse.”

“You’d like your opinion solicited? I think _you’_ ve hit your head, Burr.” But he fell upon Burr’s silence as invitation, and there had never been much patience about him, so he followed shortly along with a question: “Why do you fight, sir?”

“Because it’s the next thing.”

Alexander’s eyes shot wide open. “ _The next thing_? Not love of country, not even love of money—”

“It’s not soldiers who make money on war, Hamilton, it’s munitions men and politicians. And what country? We’re hardly one yet. It’s a fool—or _you_ —who will shed blood on speculation. I’m here because the war is here, and I plan to be here once it’s over.”

“On the winning side?”

“Sure.”

“But Burr,” Hamilton pouncing on the word as eagerly as a cat on a piece of string, “you can’t know.”

“I can hope.”

“Is that all it comes to?”

“It’s not such a small ‘all,’” Burr said. “It could be enough to kill me.”

“Do you think we _should_ win?”

“I’d prefer it.”

“Absent your own involvement?”

 _Absent my own involvement, I’d have no preference_ , he almost said, just to see the look on Hamilton’s face, but in the dark, the full glory of it would go to waste, and, in any case, if he were not there, Hamilton would be there. And his parents, too, had cared for this soil, and on their own terms. “Even absent my own involvement.”

Alexander exhaled. “At last, a principle.”

“I admit it.”

“Buried down below the muck of self-interest and equivocation, a gold coin.”

“Silver,” Burr said, to lay the bait he knew would work. “Never give unearned credit.”

“ _Actually_ —”

He let Hamilton talk for three-quarters of an hour about financials before it seemed that he, not Hamilton, was the one most in danger of falling asleep; pinching himself viciously on the back of his hand, he straightened up and scraped his head nearly raw against the tree. Alexander looked at him with weary judgment.

“Careful, sir,” he said, “or all will be lost,” and then he actually giggled, sounding sleepy. He turned his head and his bones popped like a scattering of shells. “You don’t care about money. Of course you don’t. You have money.”

“Never enough.”

“That’s my refrain, not yours.”

“We can share,” Burr offered.

“A duet?”

And suddenly there was this feeling between them of something sharper than any knife, and whatever Burr had said about stilettos, he did not know how to use this, to get out of it without cutting or bleeding. So many spots on Alexander that couldn’t ever be touched.

“My cloak, I mean,” he said easily. “You’re shivering.”

“Ah. Please. Though if you make me warm, I’m more likely to sleep. I’m too hoarse to provide any further entertainment for you, after all.”

“I’ll talk.”

“You’ve promised that, but it hasn’t happened yet,” Alexander said, accepting the corner of Burr’s cloak and edging under it. He was a light, warm weight, and Burr thought again of the deer. His deer Alexander? _My dear Alexander_ , he thought, with a twist of his mouth. Though as that positioned him as the hunter—well, he was very tired, and unaccustomed to extemporizing. He’d let that turn wind down.

So Burr talked.

He told Alexander about growing up in his uncle’s care, playing in the garden with the shadow of his parents and grandfather cooling his shoulder, so that he couldn’t throw a ball, or catch one, or take a step too quickly, without their eyes on him: no one told him this, but he felt it. He talked about what it had felt like to be in New York when there came word that the ink was dry on the Declaration; like living inside a bell that had been struck. He’d memorized the whole of it.

“I admire bold statements,” he said, tapping a listless Hamilton under his chin, driving his head back up. “You and Thomas Jefferson.”

“We make them?”

“You are them. Alexander. Talk more.”

“Why admire what you don’t perform?”

“That’s all you can contribute?”

“My thoughts feel like a cloud of dust with me in the middle. I can watch them, see them glitter, but I cannot—Burr?”

“Yes?”

“Am I d—”

“No,” Burr said shortly. “You had an encounter with the one thing on the earth more stubborn than yourself and you came out the worst for it, but you are awake, and you’re fine.” He put his arm around Alexander’s shoulder and patted him a little awkwardly—he had never been comfortable giving comfort—but when Alexander listed into him, he gave up patting and just rubbed Hamilton’s arm. The principle with horses and people must be much the same. Men and women, too, of course, but he trusted he’d never left a woman fearful or in distress. He could talk to Hamilton about _that_ , he supposed.

“I could recite pornography to you.”

Hamilton bobbed up, a man surfacing from underneath a great wave. “ _Could_ you?” Then he wriggled slightly and created a crescent of distance between his side and Burr’s. “—Intriguing. But I think I’d prefer you didn’t.”

“Share tales of exploits?”

“You’ll make me fear for my own virtue, what there is of it,” Alexander said dryly, and just like that, he sounded like himself again. “I demur, sir. And you’re avoiding a question.”

“I’m not,” he said, pointlessly aware that he sounded as touchy as Hamilton himself. “I think most of us admire what isn’t in our own characters. Why else would you trot along at Washington’s heels and paint haloes around him for his levelness and gravity?”

“Gravity pulls objects into orbit by its very nature.”

“Now who avoids the question?”

“Shh,” Alexander said, moving closer to him again, presumably feeling his virtue was secure once more. “Tell me something else, sir. It’s not stiletto and broadsword right now, it’s hammer and anvil—taking advantage of my condition to beat me down isn’t the conduct of a gentleman.”

“I will write down in my journal that I outmatched you.”

“Then history will know you unstopped your mouth after all!”

“In a cipher, for my eyes only.” He chafed at Hamilton’s shoulder again.

“Don’t tease.”

“Please?”

Hamilton made a grumbled sound that might, to a well-disposed ear, have passed for a more polite request. More clearly, he said, “You’re warm.”

“I seem so because you burn your body’s kindling trying to do everything at once.”

“You, a more sensible furnace, conserve.” He laid his head against Burr’s shoulder and Burr, hesitating a moment, decided to leave it there, although the angle was such that he couldn’t see Alexander’s eyes. There were still some hours left of the night. He would shake Hamilton up again if necessary and in the meantime rely on his own oration to keep them both alert.

“What would you like me to speak on?”

“Politics—no.” Alexander’s voice was thick with sleepiness. “Recite something to me. Only leave everyone’s clothes on.”

So he gave Hamilton the Declaration of Independence, psalm after psalm, a goodly part of _The Iliad_ in its original tongue, the best of Shakespeare’s single parts, and so on. To punctuate them, he would sometimes give Alexander a little shake to make sure he was roused, to which Alexander would mumble something sufficient to indicate his lucidity, sufficient and often remarkably profane. Burr’s lips began to grow numb. It felt like there could be no one in the world but the two of them on this empty plain, as if he’d been born in this cut of trees between the mountain and the valley, he and his Hamilton twins born with the caul of this sky above them. He fumbled his way back to the speech he knew best, and it was what he was saying as the light around them shifted into the gray that prefigured dawn.

He was saying, “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire—”

“ _What_?” Hamilton struggled upwards. “What? Are you reciting ‘ _Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God_ ’ to me? The _hell_? Why?”

“My grandfather made his fame on it.”

“Calvinists,” Hamilton said, with audible disdain. “Your grandfather might have done well to recall Scripture paints God as a shepherd. If they told you such speeches as an infant, it’s no wonder you live in terror of committing any action.”

“I’m not afraid of sin.”

“Then it’s worse, for you throw out virtue with it. You might at least be afraid of God instead of men.”

“You and virtue, you and God. Arguing with you is like trying to wrestle water.”

“Exactly—why would one even attempt it?” Rewarded by the faint sound of Burr’s laugh escaping from between his teeth, Alexander patted him on the knee, all charity and condescension. “Should I recite to you, for a change?”

“You seem improved.”

“Much so, except a rather persistent urge to vomit again. I’ll aim to be a greater kindness to you in that, if so.”

“Do. I’m out of handkerchiefs.” He watched Hamilton mop sweat off his brow with his sleeve; he really was still a little blanched, but the good color was coming back into his skin. “Give me your recitation, if you think it’ll help you keep your stomach inside you.”

“I never said that. I only asked if you wanted a change. I’m _going_ to puke again, Burr, there’s no way around that—”

“Then just—”

“You can’t rush these things,” Hamilton said, with a strange and sudden world-weariness that Burr couldn’t comprehend. “Shall I? It’s a counterpoint to the brimstone. Hamilton, Armed with Scripture, Issues Implicit Rebuke to Edwards.”

“I can’t believe I told you to talk more,” Burr said, sighing. “And don’t speak in pamphlet titles, but go on, if it will satisfy you.”

“‘Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work: If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up!’ Ecclesiastes.”

“You thank by means of citation?”

“Who said I was thanking you? _I_ was only reciting. If you deem that comes from love, if we’re just saying _all recitation_ comes from love, then what have you been doing all night, Burr, but making a most patent demonstration of feeling such as—”

“I surrender. We both merely mouthed the words of other men. Affection never entered into it.”

“Then we’re agreed.”

“Right,” Burr said slowly. “We both agree that we are—colleagues.”

“Friends.”

“It was my impression we were being coy around the subject.”

“The pretense failed,” Hamilton said, brushing some stray strands of his hair off Burr’s shoulder. “My heart was never in it. I thought to flatter you by imitation, but the mealy nature of it didn’t agree with me. Quarreling with your grandfather, on the other hand—”

“So—you’re thanking me, and admitting friendship, while _criticizing_ me?”

“Who is to criticize us, if not our friends?”

“Um. Our enemies, Alexander.”

“If you ever somehow make an enemy,” Alexander said, “I’ll fight him for you.” He put a hand to his mouth and staggered upright. “Excuse me.”

He made his way several feet into the copse. Burr rolled his head around the trunk of the tree just to keep an eye on him, and saw Alexander hold a branch and offer up the contents of his belly once more, swaying a bit—Burr was ready to stand and come after him—but then he steadied. The sun was up, he noticed. The sun was up and so was Alexander, and they had made it through the night together after all.

And he was so _hungry_. A few hours walk should return them to camp, to scant rations and sleep.

But for some reason he made a little space for them on this side of the sunrise. He patted the bed of needles.

“Come on, little lion,” he said.

“We should go.”

“Wait. Just for a moment.”


End file.
